Four books of poetry, stretching from 1983 to the present, selected down to 146 pages. Michael Hofmann has never been prolific and more recently the rate of production has further slowed. A Michael Hofmann poem is now a rare, strange, much valued item. Strange because, at first glance, many of the poems seem no more than frayed notes concerning a mood between depression and despair; but then something in that fraying catches at you, either some odd shift in register, or maybe just a sense that as your eyes are blithely passing over the words suddenly a hole has opened up beneath them and you are falling through the language, into a world of cries. Take this very short new poem, one of only seven since Approximately Nowhere, Hofmann's last book in 1999. It is titled "Poem" and dedicated to Hugo Williams:

When all's said and done, there's

still

The joyful turning towards you

That feels like the oldest,

warmest, and quite possibly

Best thing in me that I must stifle,

Almost as if you were dead,

Or I.

It seems clichéd ("When all's said and done") and sentimental at first. Then you come to "stifle" and, in the last two lines, the shift to death. Death is lightly done, announcing itself with an "almost", but it does change things, as does that last line with its two solitary words. It drops you in it. The entire poem seems a simple thought at first, then you realise it is a little more complicated than that; that it is in fact two thoughts, and that the distance spanned, smoothly yet jerkily, is between joy and death. It is a tiny Romantic poem, as personal as Emily Dickinson, as striking.

Hofmann's apparently plain manner is most evident in the earlier poems about his father. These are selected from his 1986 book, Acrimony, in which the language is full of delicacy, tension, irony, fury and a kind of desolation, and where any subtle change in register is both warning and disorientation. Some Hofmann poems claw at our throat with us hardly noticing it. Others can range well beyond the personal, though often moving within it. Another new poem, "Broken Nights", begins: "Broken knights. / No, not like that. / Well, no matter. / Something agreeably / Tennysonian . . ."

A joke. A mishearing. A bit of ultra-English kerfuffle and bumbling ("Well, no matter"), and that word "agreeably": you know that is spiked. Nobody uses the word "agreeable" without supplying the appropriate inverted commas. The jokiness and bumbling are a mask. More jokes follow. Puns and off-the-cuff remarks ("My it-doesn't-matter-suit, / With necessarily non-matching / - Matchless, makeless, makeles - "), the puns getting edgier. Then that extra Hofmann shift to what may be read as social irony or comic hauteur or a combination of the two: "Further (weewee hours). / To patronise / My #2 bathroom en bas . . ." going to "Groping for a piss, / As the poet saith." The poem grimaces and twitches and goes through a small selection of its vast vocabulary of manners. Michael Hofmann meets Brian Rix but with a jagged Germanic edge as if to say, "Look, I can lose my trousers exactly like you peculiar English. Only more so. More correct."

Beyond the personal lies the exotic and the political, or rather that unique Hofmann blend of the two. The 1980s poems were probably the best reflection in poetry of the Thatcher years, all the more so because they beat no drums, went on no marches, brandished no slogans, but simply observed through the lens of nightmare. Hofmann does not write bad poems so one may pick from almost anywhere, say a poem like "Nighthawks", which begins:

Time isn't money, at our age, it's

water.

You couldn't say we cupped our

hands very tightly . . .

We missed the second-last train,

and find ourselves

At the station with an hour to kill.

It is straightforward enough for a beginning but for that characteristic aposiopesis where the voice fades away, leaving the reader hanging on to three minimal dots. But it quickly moves on to derelicts who "queue twice round the tearoom", past "a dim acquaintance, a man with the manner / of a laughing gas victim, rich, frightened and jovial" and ends with "the hospital / lit like a toy, and the castellated factory - / a folie de grandeur of late capitalism." The poem's grasp grows ever tighter round the neck of the sickness that has brought it into being. "Rich, frightened and jovial" is an example of that perfect grip, particularly "jovial". Something is being twisted to precisely the right torque and it isn't just the world out there: it is diction meeting the nerve's demands.

It is the nerves that matter throughout. One review a long time ago talked of Hofmann's "rainy day voice". Yes, it is that, but it is a princely voice, too. Prince of nerves and manners, precise poet of desolations and furies - Hofmann's rainy day is as authentic and valuable as the weather we go out in. George Szirtes's translation of Sandor Marai's The Rebels is published by Picador.